Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,182

for her before he knew it himself.” Their union had been a magical thing. Whenever Jasper thought of it, the entire household relaxed into dreamy contentment, so powerful were his communal emotions. “She saw Carlisle and our family, and they came together to find us.”

I’d missed that first introduction, when Alice and Jasper had presented themselves to an extremely wary Carlisle, a frightened Esme, and a hostile Rosalie. It was Jasper’s warlike appearance that had them all so apprehensive, but Alice knew exactly what to say to ease their anxiety. Of course she knew exactly what to say. She’d envisioned every possible version of that momentous meeting, and then chosen the best. It was no accident that Emmett and I had been away. She’d preferred the smoother scene without the family’s primary defenders in residence.

It was hard to believe how firmly entrenched they were by the time Emmett and I arrived, just a few days later. We were both shocked, and Emmett was ready for battle the second he laid eyes on Jasper. But Alice ran forward to throw her arms around me before a word could be spoken.

I wasn’t frightened by what might have been construed as an attack. Her thoughts were so sure of me, so full of love for me, I thought I’d had the first memory loss of my second life. Because this tiny immortal knew me perfectly, better than anyone else in my current or former family. Who was she?

Oh, Edward! At last! My brother! We’re finally together!

And then, with her arms tight around my waist—and my own arms hesitantly coming to rest around her shoulders—she thought swiftly through her life from her first memory to that very moment, and then forward in time through the highlights of our next few years together. It felt very strange to realize in that instant that now I knew her, too.

“This is Alice, Emmett,” I told him, still embracing my new sister. Emmett’s aggressive pose changed to one of confusion. “She’s part of our family. And that’s Jasper. You’re going to love him.”

There were so many stories about Alice, so many miracles and phenomena, paradoxes and enigmas, I could have spent the rest of the week just telling Bella the bullet-point version. Instead, I gave her a few of the simpler, more mechanical details.

“She’s most sensitive to nonhumans. She always sees, for example, when another group of our kind is coming near. And any threat they may pose.” Alice had become one of the family’s defenders, too.

“Are there a lot of… your kind?” Bella asked, sounding a little shaken by the idea.

“No, not many,” I assured her. “But most won’t settle in any one place. Only those like us, who’ve given up hunting you people”—I raised an eyebrow at her and squeezed her hand—“can live together with humans for any length of time. We’ve only found one other family like ours, in a small village in Alaska. We lived together for a time, but there were so many of us that we became too noticeable.” Also Tanya, the matriarch of that clan, was persistent to the point of harassment. “Those of us who live… differently tend to band together.”

“And the others?”

We’d reached her home. It was empty, no lights in any windows. I parked in her usual spot and turned the engine off. The sudden quiet felt very intimate, there in the dark.

“Nomads, for the most part,” I answered. “We’ve all lived that way at times. It gets tedious, like anything else. But we run across the others now and then, because most of us prefer the North.”

“Why is that?”

I grinned and nudged her gently with my elbow. “Did you have your eyes open this afternoon? Do you think I could walk down the street in the sunlight without causing traffic accidents? There’s a reason why we chose the Olympic Peninsula, one of the most sunless places in the world. It’s nice to be able to go outside in the day. You wouldn’t believe how tired you can get of nighttime in eighty-odd years.”

“So that’s where the legends came from,” she said, nodding to herself.

“Probably.”

There was actually a precise source behind the legends, but that wasn’t something I wanted to get into. The Volturi were very far away and very much absorbed in their mission to police the vampire world. They would never affect Bella’s life beyond the lore they’d concocted to protect immortals’ privacy.

“And Alice came from another family, like Jasper?” she asked.

“No, and that is a