Luminosity Read online

  We received our menus after we'd sat down at our little table in the back corner. I scanned it, trying to pick two things - I eventually decided on a pasta primavera entrée and minestrone soup. I thought I could probably finish the whole bowl of soup and a third of the pasta, which would have to do for alleviating odd looks. Edward received my whispered ordering instruction with a nod, and faithfully reported my soup request as though it were his own when the waiter wandered by.

  My bread basket and glasses of water for each of us arrived promptly, and I took a sip from mine. Then I glanced around the restaurant; it wasn't very crowded. "I know you don't like food," I murmured to Edward, "but what about drinks - water?"

  He blinked. "You know, it never occurred to me to try drinking water?" he said wryly. He picked up his glass and took a swallow, then set it down again, smacking his lips thoughtfully.

  "Verdict?" I asked. "You know your usual diet is ninety-five percent water."

  "Somewhat warmer water," said Edward, a little absently, looking at the glass. "It doesn't taste like anything. It doesn't seem to affect my thirst either way. I suppose it'd contribute to the disguise if we were seen drinking water occasionally."

  "Considerably," I speculated. "It never occurred to any of you?"

  "I'm sure at least one of "us" in general tried it at one time," he said, avoiding the word "vampire" - either he'd noticed someone listening, or thought there might be a spectator with my same mental opacity. "I don't know about my family, but I doubt it."

  "Huh." I wondered what other things they'd simply not tried. "Do you want to taste the broth of my soup?"

  "No, the soup is for you," he said. "If it seems appropriate to try more liquids I can do it without helping myself to your lunch."

  I shrugged and took a roll, which I buttered. "Tell me what happened after you found the shark," I said encouragingly, trying to get him to pick up his story where he'd been at the end of the drive.

  "You don't think I've talked too much about myself for an entire year?" he asked wryly.

  "It's interesting," I said. "You've got fewer constraints and more time than... than most people, and you use it well."

  "Well," said Edward, "why don't you tell me what you would want to do with all that time and without all those constraints?"

  I bit into my roll. "Why don't you want me to have that?" I asked quietly, after I swallowed it.

  He looked pained. "This is a bad place, I think," he said. "I'm - I'm trying not to keep secrets. But this is a bad place."

  It really was, I supposed. "In the car, then," I said.

  "All right," Edward replied, softly.

  * * *

  Chapter 7: Souls

  My soup was tasty. The pasta was all right, although the cook took the idea of "al dente" more seriously than I preferred. My estimates about my appetite proved basically accurate, and when I'd finished eating and gotten a box for the remaining food, Edward paid the bill and we left the restaurant. "It's a nice place," I said.

  "I'm glad you liked it," he said heavily - nervous about having to tell me why he didn't care to have me immortal? - and unlocked his car. I got in; he waited for a gap in traffic, then ducked into the driver's seat and pulled out.

  "So," I said.

  "Right," he sighed, taking the exit onto the highway and rapidly getting up to speed. "I'm not expecting you to understand this."

  "Try me," I said peevishly.

  "First," he said, "can you tell me about your religious leanings?"

  This didn't make a lot of sense. "Why is that relevant?"

  "I'm asking this first because otherwise I'm not sure how to present my position," he said.

  "I don't think about religion much," I said. "Renée tries out new churches like some people try on shoes. She never made a habit of bringing me along."

  "What do you believe about souls?" asked Edward, and I had an inkling of where this was going.

  "Edward, if you're going to tell me that I have a soul because I'm a human and you don't because you're a vampire, that's a ridiculousobjection. What is it that you think souls do? What functionality do you think you lost back in 1918? You can clearly think, so if you're right about who's got a soul, then souls don't do that. You can make the decision to not slaughter everybody around you even when they'd be delectable, so if you're right, souls don't handle moral reasoning. You've got memories, so your soul wasn't storing those for you until it left. And it would be remarkably original theology if you said that the soul was responsible for making humans breakable and slow and weak and mortal, but if that's what souls do, I'm not sure why anybody would want one."

  "What about an afterlife?" Edward murmured.

  "What about it? Suppose there's a God," I humored him. "Suppose there's a God and he likes to stash dead people in afterlives appropriate to them when they die. Why would a soul be called for? If for some reason one were essential, why couldn't you just be issued a new one if something unfortunate happened to your first one? This is God we're talking about. He isn't going to run out of ectoplasm to make souls out of. He's not going to forget who you are because you don't have your soul attached. Or maybe that's not what you mean," I said. "Maybe you mean vampires automatically go to hell, when you play with matches a little too much - but think about that, really. You didn't hold a flamethrower to Carlisle's head and demand to be changed, did you?"

  "No," Edward murmured.

  "Right, you were delirious with the flu, most of the way to dead. Scarcely in a position to be held responsible for anything you did. But let's say that you're destined for hell for something you didn't do anyway. If that's the sort of thing that can get you damned, I'm probably already in trouble for having divorced parents, or for having eaten non-kosher baby food, or something like that."

  "You won't be delirious with the flu," Edward said darkly.

  "You're right. I won't. But I thought you were talking about a property of vampires in general, not just willfully turned ones," I said. "Right? No fiddling around with your theory while we're in the middle of a conversation about it, please."

  "...Right."

  "Now when Carlisle turned - let's not use you as an example. When Carlisle turned Esme, she had just fallen off a cliff and was dying. At that time, she had a soul, right?"

  Edward made an awful face. "Okay, okay," he said. "Never mind about souls."

  I sighed. "Do you actually no longer believe that turning into a vampire makes an important thing called a "soul" evaporate, or do you just not want to think about Esme being someone who lacks an important thing called a "soul"?"

  He was silent, and I sighed heavily and closed my eyes again to avoid looking at the whoosh of trees to either side of the highway.

  * * *

  Edward dropped me off at my house. "Have a good weekend, Bella," he said tightly. I'd pushed him a little too far - he'd remained silent throughout the rest of the drive back from Port Angeles even when I tried to get him to resume telling the story about the shark. He drove away with no mention of the possibility that he might come in and continue talking to me and no attempt to make more plans. I practically flounced into the house and up to my room.

  I gave myself a little shake. I hadn't screwed anything up permanently. I was literallyincapable of screwing things up permanently with Edward. The worst I could do would be to die of old age out of spite.

  That didn't mean I should abuse this freedom. (In particular, it would be very foolish of me to die if it turned out there was no good reason I ought to.) But it did mean that it wasn't very productive of me to fret about things I'd already done.

  Bringing up Esme had clearly been the sticking point, but he hadn't seemed very comfortable before that, either. It was probably a touchy subject. If I thought souls were important and that I didn't have one I probably wouldn't want to talk about them at all, I guessed. He'd only felt it relevant because it was part of why he wanted me to stay human.

  I wondered if the other vampires believed the same
thing as Edward, about souls. I wrote down that I should ask them this. I also wrote, while I had my notebook out, that Alice had promised we'd have the conversation about her powers "later".

  Once I'd written this down, I felt strangely... blank. I'd been looking forward to a nice, empty Saturday to do my thinking with. Then my hand had been forced on the decision all that thinking was for: Alice had shown up and cornered me into agreeing to be friends with Edward. (And this was shaking out to mean that I agreed to go out to lunch in a cozy Italian restaurant in Port Angeles with Edward on his dime after listening breathlessly to his exciting stories for hours on end. No wonder Alice had found my concession satisfactory.) All I had left to do was ask more questions, not process existing knowledge. And I'd gone and done all my homework.

  Well, maybe I wasn't completely out of things to mull over. I could probably kill at least an hour producing an updated approximation of how I felt about Edward.

  But I didn't really want to write that sort of thing down until I'd dealt with the fact that Alice could see me writing anything I decided to write. Would she be able to read things I wrote if I typed them, with a box over my keyboard and a blanket over the monitor and my head? My spelling would suffer, but not irretrievably. She only saw things, visually, so that should do it unless her vantage point was so flexible that it could be between my face and the screen - but it called for a test. A realtest, where I only had a guess, not an expectation.

  I wrote that down. (If Alice saw that and had the afternoon free maybe she'd show up and we'd conduct the experiment right away.)

  I tried to push the problem around in my head without writing anything. It was hard - I kept not trusting conclusions I'd gotten to and having to backtrack and reestablish them. My independence from my notebooks, which I'd thought so well-honed when I first arrived in Forks, was not solid enough to hold up to serious problems. My unaided brain was fine for little things. But thinking back, I'd needed three pages to decide to leave Phoenix at all. I frowned to myself. This was a problem.

  Wean self from notebooks, I wrote under my to-hack list. I crossed off the line about looking at pretty people: I was pretty sure they didn't mind. And then I spent my afternoon thinking kind thoughts about rain.

  Clouds, I thought, will help me hide when I am a vampire.

  * * *

  I did not see any vampires on Sunday.

  I got lonely (Charlie had to work), and so I called and convinced Angela, Jessica, and even Lauren to all join me for a movie. There were no proper theaters in Forks, so we all piled into Jessica's mother's car and drove to Port Angeles. The theater we found was still showing the Phantom of the Opera movie, which Jessica badgered us all into seeing.

  Lauren complained about the movie selection, citing the "incredible lameness" of musicals, but went in with us instead of buying a ticket to something else. When we walked out, she was swooning over Gerard Butler, talking over Jessica's attempt to claim all the credit for the movie's highlights. I dismissively told her that he looked like a grown up version of Eric. This was a blatant lie (the coloring was right, but nothing about their features matched), but it seemed like a convenient way to have her thinking about Eric without thinking that I was after him myself. I couldn't tell by looking at her if this had worked.

  We got lunch, wandered around the city, and stopped in a few stores to admire articles of clothing, to justify the trip with more than just the one movie. Angela bought a sweater and Jessica succumbed to the temptation of a pair of heels. I considered buying a ruffly red blouse, but eventually skipped it. Lauren tried on everything she saw but didn't want to make any purchases.

  We ran out of steam at about five p.m. and decided to go back to Forks instead of getting an early dinner in Port Angeles. I made fried fish - Charlie had our freezer packed from top to bottom with fish from his Saturday trip - and then baked a pan of brownies just to have something more to do. If I had been a vampire, I wouldn't have needed baked goods to occupy myself. If I'd been a vampire, I could have run all the way to Port Angeles, doing gymnastics on the way without putting a foot wrong, and bought that blouse and run back. If I'd been a vampire, I could do all the thinking I wanted to do in my head where it was safe with my vampire total recall supplanting my notebooks. If I'd been a vampire, I could have just been stuck like Edward, stuck withEdward, and wouldn't have needed to do so much thinking in the first place.

  I frowned to myself as I took the brownies out of the oven and immediately cut one for myself, letting it cool faster on a plate of its own. I shouldn't not want to think; that seemed bad. I caught myself trying to amend the thought and quickly muttered to myself, "I don't want to think about whether I want Edward and don't know why" too quietly for Charlie to hear and too indistinctly for Alice to be likely to be able to read my lips. It wasn't as good as writing, but it moved the idea from my vague memory of my own thoughts into my slightly more reliable auditory storage.

  I ate my brownie slowly and pondered. Dealing with Edward did show signs of being the single most momentous decision of my life. I had thought it was a big deal when I moved out of Arizona for Renée's sake, but changing residence didn't hold a candle to changing species and acquiring a mate-for-life. I was seventeen. Renée talked constantly about how she'd gotten married too young, and she'd already been twenty when I was born very soon after the wedding. (I was only barely not a honeymoon baby. She took great care to emphasize that she did not regret having me, but I'd found it surprisingly easy to come to terms with the fact that if my parents had been smarter, I wouldn't exist.) Renée had drilled into my head that marriage was something mature and smart people took seriously, something that was not good or sane to rush into, something that she swore up and down not to prod me about until I was at least thirty.

  Edward had not presented me with jewelry of any kind, let alone an engagement ring, but from what Alice said, my merely being turned would drop me into something a good dealmore serious than a marriage. Renée's rash action had only landed her a daughter and the need to spend time with a divorce lawyer and, likely, some emotional turmoil.

  Edward was already stuck, but I didn't have to be. If I got myself stuck, and it was a bad idea, I could never undo it unless I had some quality no other mated vampire known to Edward had ever had.

  I considered the possibility that he was lying about what he had and had not heard of. (I had finished my brownie by this point, and was muttering to myself freely in the relative privacy of my room. As an added layer of precaution, I buried my face in my pillow.) He had been prepared to go to some trouble to avoid it in other situations, after Alice's advice. And it didn't seem like he had any reason to believe that I'd find the prospect of an unbreakable commitment more enticing than a merely intense and magically propped-up one. No motive. Probably wasn't a lie, then.

  I wondered by what mechanism vampires were stuck. Edward had been quite capable of becoming cross with me and ending our day together when I said something he didn't like. He wasn't physically prevented from leaving my side. He wasn't limited exclusively to positive emotions towards me. I wondered what he would do if I told him I never wanted to see him again and that he should go away. I didn't want to test that - that much I knew - but it would be useful information to have. What happened if vampires tried to break up?

  I was going about this the wrong way, I decided. The effect was probably more to do with the selection process. Edward had been around for quite some time and it took him that long to find me. There were too many vampire couples running around for it to be a matter of finding one's One True Soulmate out of all the world - there were just too many people. There had to be a pool of possible soulmates that only narrowed to one when that one was encountered.

  I didn't know if most vampires met their fated beloveds after they'd both been turned, like Alice and Jasper, or when one was human, like Carlisle and Esme. If it was the former, then whatever it was that narrowed down the potential candidates probably correlated with something that
was likely to get those candidates turned into vampires, too. That held with me, at least - I had my mental privacy (a million thanks to whatever quirk had given me that) and humans with promising talents were commonly turned. If it was the latter... then I could only imagine a lot of vampires who ate humans and didn't take the time to introduce themselves first were going to wander alone forever, but that was beside the point.

  If it was the latter, and not every coven had an Alice to give them instructions and assure them that vampirehood was in their target's future, then I could only imagine that most humans selected in this way were turned against their wills. Most vampires thought nothing of slaughtering people left and right; leaving their only shot at having companionship up to the wayward affections of the human companion would not be the sort of thing they'd opt to do when they could just take a bite.

  But it was hard for them to stop when they hunted. Probably, turning instead of killing was also hard... Carlisle had turned Edward, Esme, Rosalie, and Emmett. He was the one with the extra, special ability to resist the lure of blood.

  And there were supposed to be a lot of married vampires, not just among the Cullens.

  So most likely, vampire couples typically met as vampires and were symmetrically attached from day one.

  Drat. No readily available precedents to anchor on. Unless the Cullen couple I hadn't learned as much about - Rosalie and Emmett - had a story relevant to the situation.

  And I was back to having questions to ask, not previously acquired information to turn over in my head.

  * * *

  I sat with the vampires at lunch again on Monday. I wasn't sure, as I approached the cafeteria, whether they'd welcome me, but Alice flitted by and murmured that I could join them, and so once I'd collected my food I took the empty chair at their table. All of them had bottles of water; Jasper sipped from his constantly, making it look like a nervous habit, and every now and then, one of the others would take a swallow as well.