Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,141

were away.…

I waited for her to show me, but she was focusing very hard on just looking at my face now. Trying not to show me.

“What things? What did you see?”

Her eyes were pained. They weren’t pleasant things. At some point—if you hadn’t come back when you did, if you’d never loved her—you would have come back for her anyway. To… hunt her.

Still no pictures, but I didn’t need them to understand. I reeled away from her, nearly losing control of the car. I stomped on the brake, and pulled off the road. The tires tore into the ferns and threw patches of moss onto the pavement.

The thought had been there, in the very beginning, when the monster was nearly unbridled. That there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t eventually follow her, wherever she might go.

“Give me something that will work!” I exploded. Alice cringed away from the volume. “Tell me another path! Show me how to stay away—where to go!”

In her thoughts, suddenly another vision replaced the first. A gasp of relief choked through my lips when the horror was removed. But this vision was not much better.

Alice and Bella, arms around each other, both marble white and diamond hard.

One too many pomegranate seeds, and she was bound to the underworld with me. No way back. Springtime, sunlight, family, future, soul, all stolen from her.

It’s sixty-forty… ish. Maybe even sixty-five-thirty-five. There’s still a good chance you won’t kill her. Her tone was one of encouragement.

“She’s dead, either way,” I whispered. “I’ll stop her heart.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant. I’m telling you that she has futures beyond the meadow… but first she has to go through the meadow—the metaphorical meadow—if you catch my meaning.”

Her thoughts… it was difficult to describe… widened out as if she was thinking everything at the same time—and I could see a tangle of threads, each thread a long line of frozen images, each thread a future told in snapshots, all of them snared together in a messy knot.

“I don’t understand.”

All her paths are leading to one point—all her paths are knotted together. Whether that point is in the meadow, or somewhere else, she’s tied to that moment of decision. Your decision, her decision.… Some of the threads continue on the other side. Some…

“Do not.” My voice faltered through my tight throat.

You can’t avoid it, Edward. You’re going to have to face it. Knowing it could easily go either way, you still have to face it.

“How do I save her? Tell me!”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to find the answer yourself, in the knot. I can’t see exactly what form it will take, but there will be a moment, I think—a test, a trial. I can see that, but I can’t help you with it. Only the two of you can choose in that moment.”

My teeth ground together.

You know that I love you, so listen to me now. Putting this off won’t change anything. Take her to your meadow, Edward, and—for me, and especially for you—bring her back again.

I let my head fall into my hands. I felt sick—like a damaged human, a victim of disease.

“How about some good news?” Alice asked gently.

I glared up at her. She smiled a small smile.

Seriously.

“Tell me, then.”

“I’ve seen a third way, Edward,” she said. “If you can get through the crisis, there’s a new path out there.”

“A new path?” I echoed blankly.

“It’s sketchy. But look.”

Another picture in her head. Not as sharp as the others. A trio in the cramped front room of Bella’s house. I was on the aged sofa, Bella beside me, my arm casually slung around her shoulders. Alice sat on the floor beside Bella, leaning against her leg in a familiar fashion. Alice and I were exactly the same as we always were, but this was a version of Bella I’d never seen before. Her skin was still soft and translucent, pink across the cheeks, healthy. Her eyes were still warm and brown and human. But she was different. I analyzed the changes, and realized what I was seeing.

Bella was not a girl, but a woman. Her legs looked a little longer, as if she’d grown an inch or two, and her body had rounded subtly, giving a new curvature to her slender frame. Her hair was sable-dark, as if she’d spent little time in the sun during the intervening years. Not many years, maybe three or four. But she was still human.

Joy and pain washed through me. She was still human; she was