Luminosity Read online

  The Volturi were a coven of five: three male vampires and the wives of two. (The third used to have a wife, but she was dead. And, of course, had not been replaced since then.) The wives were not public figures - only the males, Aro, Caius, and Marcus, were the active face of the Volturi. (Aro was not the only one with an extra power; Marcus apparently "saw" relationships between people.) Edward was fuzzy on their earlier history, and suggested that I ask Carlisle if curious about that. The doctor had apparently spent some time among their guard (a considerably larger extension of the coven, including many vampires handpicked for promising talents).

  Edward speculated that humans smelled tastier than other species because vampires had been humans in the past and survived most effectively on the same blood that had sustained their prior existences, but he wasn't sure.

  I took copious notes. There was so much I had to think about and process already, and I was just adding more. I wondered if it would be best to forego the tour, but decided that I was already there and ought to have a look.

  * * *

  The first floor contained the hall I'd seen, the kitchen I'd gotten a peek at, the piano dais I'd noticed, the dining section I'd sat in, and also a bathroom, some communal offices for things like household bookkeeping and investment portfolios, and a seating area around a large flatscreen television and several computers.

  The second floor included the suite Carlisle and Esme shared, with their studies and Carlisle's library as well as another bathroom. (I was briefly puzzled about why the vampire bathrooms had shampoo and soap in them. They were clearly not trying to blend in for surprise visitors, or they would have included toilet paper. Then I realized that even without the habits of sweating and shedding skin that we humans had, vampires could accumulate dirt from their environments at normal rates.) Besides the suite were Rosalie and Emmett's room, which I didn't get to see as Rosalie didn't want to be disturbed, and an adjoining pair of rooms shared by Jasper and Alice.

  I noticed along the wall in the hallway floor that there were a lot of photographs, and paused to look at some of them. I saw a wedding photo - an old photo - for Carlisle and Esme. There was also a wedding photo for Alice and Jasper - so they were married, then, and not just "together" as Jessica had artlessly put it. And Rosalie and Emmett had six. In each, they stood against a different backdrop, and Rosalie wore a different dress. I wasn't sure why anyone needed to get married six times, but I suspected that dresses were a motivating factor. Besides the wedding photos, I also noticed a series of family portraits. Carlisle and Edward were alone together in the first one - interesting. Edward had been earliest. Esme appeared in the next. Rosalie was the next addition, followed by Emmett. Then, it seemed, Alice and Jasper had arrived as a pair.

  On the top floor was a library - or Edward called it that; I peeped inside and saw fewer books than Carlisle had in his personal library. There were more computers there, and some broad tables accompanied by chairs. I asked whether it was really much of a library, and Edward grudgingly told me that it was more like their preferred venue for document forgery and computer cracking and the like. This didn't faze me particularly; it was inevitable that they'd need skills and the wherewithal to pull them off in order to persist unaging in a human society.

  Also on the top floor was Edward's room. It jutted up against the south wall, and accordingly shared part of the enormous window. It was late enough to be dark, but I knew in the daylight the view would be spectacular indeed.

  Edward's room had its own closet and bathroom, like Rosalie and Emmett's. Unlike the entire rest of the house, it wasn't decorated in white: his carpet was gold, and he'd draped the walls completely over with darker golden fabric. The only furniture was a black leather sofa, a desk, and a desk chair. He had his own computer (how many computers did they need? I'd counted fourteen, and I hadn't even looked in all of the rooms) and shelves upon shelves of CDs. Apparently, he was a music buff - I wondered if he was responsible for the piano in its place of honor on the ground floor.

  "Is that the whole house?" I asked.

  "There's a basement, which I can't think of a safe way to get you into," he said. "It's meant to be difficult to access if you aren't a vampire. There's also an outbuilding we converted into a garage."

  I didn't have a strong enough interest in cars to want to hike - or be carried - to an outbuilding distant enough that I hadn't seen it. "I'll skip the garage," I said.

  "Very well," said Edward. "What's next?"

  "I think I'm about ready to go home," I said. "Charlie might worry."

  Edward offered to take me home, and while I knew he could just run back to the Cullen house and therefore there weren't vehicular logistics issues, I declined. I wanted to think. I wanted to think without Edward nearby. I wanted to think alone, secure in my truck where no one could hear me, as I talked aloud to compensate for the fact that I couldn't write while driving.

  Edward walked me to the door, bade me a polite goodbye accompanied by a freezing touch to my arm, and watched me as I got behind the wheel and pulled away from the vampire house.

  Charlie was embedded in the couch, watching a sporting event I didn't bother to identify, when I got home. He yelled his gratitude for the sandwiches as I ascended the stairs, and I called back that it was no trouble.

  It was late. I had school in the morning. Most of my homework wasn't done. And I had more "vampire stuff" to work through than I had ever had of any kind of work all at one time.

  I weighed my options, but finally decided that cutting English twice in so short a time frame would be bad, and I slept.

  Chapter 6: Edward

  I hurried through Friday trying as hard as I could to avoid more vampire stuff to process. I stuck to my human friends, finding someone to walk with between each class and sitting with them at lunch. During lunch I made homework buddy plans with Angela that involved me driving her to my house immediately after school. (Angela lived near enough to walk between school and home, and wouldn't leave a car behind that she'd have to fetch later.) When I met up with her right after gym, it successfully deterred Edward from catching up with me (I caught a glimpse of him in the parking lot, and his expression said that he certainly would have).

  Angela hopped into my truck and we rumbled down the highway and to my house. I fixed us celery sticks and plopped some dip into a bowl, and then it was several hours solid of homework. At least ostensibly. Angela subscribed to the "work next to each other" theory of group studying, and didn't look over my shoulder. I finished everything that was due on Monday so it wouldn't hang over my head on the weekend. But after that, I pulled out my personal, non-school notebook, and thought in plain sight.

  I had reasonably strong evidence that vampires "mated for life", so to speak. I didn't know if they ever engaged in casual friends-with-benefits arrangements, but from what Edward had said, if they actually went so far as to fall in love, there they stayed. Alice had said only that Edward "liked" me. But she had a strong motive to avoid spooking me and sending me out of Forks on the next plane. She'd asked me to promise not to stop speaking to her brother, and she'd approached me before I'd made any mental threats to go to Charlie about the family - she'd approached me at the first available opportunity after I'd decided to treat Edward's staring as a harrassment issue. (Well, she had also saved me from Tyler's van, but that was the sort of thing that would have likely turned up in any future-peeking she did about me.)

  I wasn't sure if this particular aspect of vampirism "worked" with humans like me. But... If I would be easy for Edward to forget about, if I were just an arbitrary human who caught his fancy, there was no reason for the vampires to have any collective interest in me at all. There would be no reason for Edward to follow Alice's guidelines about what would set me off. There would be no reason for him to put himself through the ordeal of being around my super-yummy self. There would be no reason for his family to trouble themselves to welcome me. There would be no reason for Alice to see me eventually becomin
g a vampire. He would have every motivation in the world to go chew on elephants in Kenya or otherwise be not-here until I graduated and went off to college.

  If Alice saw me as her future sister-in-law, though... eternally and vampirically bound to Edward...

  Yes, then I could see Edward's family rallying around him, glad that the odd one out of their number had at last found his eternal bride - just add venom. I could see them graciously agreeing to satisfy my curiosities - which would have been dismissible at best and a death sentence at worst for anyone else. I could see Alice focusing on me, thinking of what I would do if Edward pursued me any of a hundred ways, coaching him...

  I uttered a quiet curse. Angela looked up and I thwacked my trig book in plausible annoyance. She politely told me that her father was a minister and she'd be much obliged if I didn't swear at triangles around her, then looked back at her English essay.

  I was suddenly reminded of something I'd written - at least a year and a half ago, I thought. That meant it would be in my computer, with my compiled and archived older thoughts, not in my notebook. I got up and fetched it; Angela wasn't curious, and I supposed she expected I'd be typing up my essay.

  * * *

  I tried a few too-generic keywords, searching through my logs and turning up a lot of redundancy. Finally I typed the phrase "romance novel", and my word processor took me directly to the correct section. A little under two years previously, I'd been the beneficiary of my great-aunt's sudden conversion to Catholicism and her disposal of her "sinful" book collection. She'd actually given the volumes to Renée, but Renée left them lying about, and I'd been bored one afternoon.

  At a first glance, it was bewildering that women read the things. The formula, at least of the type my great-aunt had preferred, was not one that my fifteen-year-old self had found appealing. My first writings about the novels complained that they all put their heroines in helpless situations - often, they were chased by some relentless hero who could not, if it came down to it, be deterred. My great-aunt had liked fantasy romances in particular, and it was not at all uncommon for the male leads to be various types of supernatural creature with unusual mating habits such that they were committed to attaining the heroine from the moment they spotted her.

  My original notes about this trend were scoffing, contemptuous. I'd thought the women in those books were all idiotic ninnies for "giving in". I thought the authors were backwards and sexist for writing situations like that.

  My next relevant entry was about a month and a half afterwards. I'd happened to acquire the soundtrack to "The Beauty and the Beast" (I had a soft spot for the story due to name similarities), and noticed that there was a similar pattern. Belle was, of course, trapped in the Beast's castle. If she annoyed him, he certainly had the capacity to do her immense harm, and he frightened her with this power.

  What he couldn't do was exercise this option one iota more than she cared to forgive, without sabotaging himself.

  Beauty and the Beast was an unusual story of the pattern in that there was an explicit result the Beast wanted and had to earn by getting Belle to love him. The romance novels tended to leave that embedded in a way that was too subtle for me to get at first. In the fairy tale (as retold by Disney with singing tea services, of course), love was the prerequisite for the Beast to be debeastified. In the novels, love was the goal itself.

  What Belle and the other heroines had was absolute power over whether their romantic interests got to win the prizes they were after.

  The only way the Beast could get what he wanted - and it wasn't even a sure thing - was to throw himself into becoming whoBelle wanted and doing what Belle wanted. He needed her; she was merely under his power. If there had been no time limit, if he could have kept her stuck in his castle forever, all the roaring and destruction he could bring to bear wouldn't become any more effective. He couldn't win by coercing her into saying certain words or performing certain acts; he had to win by making her feel a certain way.

  As a romance trope, where the entire point of the book was for the couple depicted on the cover art to be together in the end, this pattern was subject to a certain condition. Specifically, there could not be any non-personal reason for the heroine to reject her suitor. His personality was malleable - she could ask for whatever she liked, holding all the cards as she did - but if he happened to be poor or ugly or otherwise objectionable in some less readily addressable way, the book would a) make a worse wish-fulfillment story for the target audience, and b) feel implausible.

  It was a very strange feeling, to have landed in a romance novel.

  Because unless I was very much mistaken, I had acquired for myself a vampire who had one chance at love, inexplicably me; who knew that he could only get what he wanted if I was happy; and who was most definitelynot poor, ugly, or otherwise objectionable.

  * * *

  Angela completed her essay, and asked to be driven home. I closed my laptop and managed to get her to her house without driving us into any trees, despite my mind's insistence on continuing to reel. I thought I knew the situation; I just didn't know what Iwanted out of it, and that was a very uncomfortable thing to not know.

  I drove home alone, frowning at the road.

  Charlie had returned from work by the time I pulled into the driveway. I blew into the house, put a pot of water on the boil, and made spaghetti; I didn't have the energy for anything complicated. There were meatballs in the freezer and jars of sauce in the pantry. I threw everything together once the pasta had cooked, brought Charlie his plate in the family room, and ate mine at the kitchen table.

  Exactly one minute after I'd finished my helping of food, the doorbell rang.

  "I got it," I called to Charlie, and I went to answer the door, expecting one or another of the vampires. I was right. It was Alice.

  "Your future went all dizzy," she said, accusation in her voice. She spoke softly enough that there was no way for Charlie to hear her over the television. "I have an awful headache. Can I come in?"

  "Fine," I said, standing aside. They weren't going to let me think alone very much, were they? I supposed that was why Alice saw me going "dizzy". My only plans right now were to make up my mind. But that was exactly what muddied her visions.

  I showed Alice up to my room, and sat on my bed. She took my desk chair, spun it around to face me, and planted her elbows on her knees. "Edward's going out of his mind," Alice said baldly.

  "You know," I said, "until yesterday I didn't think he knew you'd told me that he "liked" me."

  Alice winced. "He didn't, until yesterday. I'm usually fairly good at avoiding thoughts I don't want him to catch. I slipped up."

  "I do need time to think things through, and make decisions," I complained. "I don't like to issue snap judgments about anything important. I have to figure out what I want, and make sure that I approve of the reasons I have for wanting it, and pick the best way available to get it, and I prefer to do this in writing, but I don't like to write too much with anybody around, and so I have to wait until I'm alone or near somebody who thinks I'm taking some other kind of notes and won't look. I was going to block out all Saturday to do it. You couldn't wait?"

  "Edward couldn't wait. He begged me to talk to you," said Alice. "Begged. Bella, I think hewould have given you lots of time, all the time you wanted, he probably would have told us all to stay away from you and give you plenty of space, but - oh, you should have seen him the day you switched lab partners!" she exclaimed. "He was practically in a panic. He thought he could take off for a week and you'd be right where he left you, waiting forhim to sort his thoughts out. But you didn't. He went back to school and found out that you were trying to get away from him and couldn't stand it - you're smart, I know you've figured this all out, I saw you writing it." She waved a hand.

  With a sharp shock, I realized that Alice's power wasn't necessarily more ethically innocuous than Jasper's or Edward's. "Alice," I started hotly.

  She shook her head, causing her s
hort black hair to fly around. "No. Sorry to interrupt, but no. Later. Later, we will have that conversation. Promise. Right now, we will talk about Edward. You figured it out, you're very smart, be proud of yourself, pleasedon't run away someplace inaccessible just because the situation is horribly awkward."

  "Am I allowed to say anything, or are you just here to plead for Edward's sanity?" I asked, perturbed.

  "I just want to stick to the topic. You can talk," Alice huffed.

  "What do you - or Edward, or anybody - expect me to do?" I inquired, spreading my hands helplessly. "Does he really think it's going to speed things up to not give me Saturday to get my head straight?"

  "No. I don't think he even knows what he wants to happen here. He thinks I'm going to pick magic words that will magically make you magically decide that you're magically in love with him. Jasper was on edge all through lunch today, picking up Edward's mood when you didn't sit with us, it was awful." Alice shook her head disgustedly. "I told him, I told him, that he needed to go slow."

  I took a very deep breath. "What's it like?" I asked. My voice came out soft and earnest where I'd been expecting exasperation - that was interesting.

  "I don't think I'm typical there," Alice frowned. "I'd been a vampire for almost twenty-eight years when I started seeing Jasper in my visions. I knew just what to expect. I waited for him in a diner, and he showed up, and I walked right up to him and said "You've been keeping me waiting a long time," and he ducked his head like a good Southern gentleman and said, "I'm sorry, ma'am." And then I held out my hand and he took it and we were... whole. Emmett has a better story," she said. "I think he'd prefer to tell it himself, though."

  "I'm right, then," I said, "that it doesn't matter if I'm a human or a vampire, it works the same way?"