“Is it all out?” Carlisle asked. He worried he’d been too quick with the painkiller, that it might be covering the venom burn.
But Alice had seen it would be fine.
“Her blood tastes clean.” The sound of my voice was rough, grating. “I can taste the morphine.”
“Bella?” Carlisle asked in a low, clear voice.
“Mmmmm?” was her response.
“Is the fire gone?”
“Yes,” she breathed, a little clearer now. “Thank you, Edward.”
“I love you.”
She sighed, eyes still closed. “I know.”
The chuckle that bubbled up from my chest surprised me. I had her blood on my tongue. It was probably tinting the edges of my irises red even now. It was drying into my clothes and dyeing my skin. But she could still make me laugh.
“Bella?” Carlisle asked again.
“What?” Her tone was testy now. She looked half-asleep and impatient to find the other half.
“Where is your mother?”
Her eyes flickered for a second, and then she exhaled. “In Florida. He tricked me, Edward. He watched our videos.”
Though she was nearly unconscious from trauma and morphine, it was clear she was deeply offended by this invasion of privacy. I smiled.
“Alice?” Bella struggled to open her eyes, and then quit, but her words were as urgent as she could make them in her condition. “Alice, the video—he knew you, Alice, he knew where you came from.… I smell gasoline?”
Emmett and Jasper were back from siphoning the accelerant we needed. The sirens still wailed in the distance, but from another direction now. They weren’t going to find us.
With a somber expression, Alice flitted across the ravaged floor to the media center by the door. She picked up the small handheld video recorder that was still running. She switched it off.
In the instant she decided to retrieve the camera, hundreds of future fragments flashed through her mind—images of this room, of Bella, of the tracker, of the blood. It was everything she would see when she played back the recording, too fast and disordered for either of us to absorb much. Her eyes flashed to mine.
We’ll deal with this later. We have a hundred things to do now to make sense of this nightmare.
I could tell she was purposely directing her thoughts away from the camera as she ran through the rather involved chores we now must accomplish, but I didn’t push. Later.
“It’s time to move her,” Carlisle said. The smell of the gasoline Emmett and Jasper were applying to the walls was becoming overwhelming.
“No,” Bella murmured. “I want to sleep.”
“You can sleep, sweetheart,” I crooned in her ear. “I’ll carry you.”
Her leg was wrapped tightly inside Alice’s floorboard splint, and Carlisle had found time to tape her ribs. Moving more carefully than I ever had before, I lifted her from the blood-soaked floor, trying to support every part of her.
“Sleep now, Bella,” I whispered.
27. CHORES
“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.”