Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,240

“You’re not ruining everything over me!”

She thrashed against Emmett’s hold. The only part of her that was still was her trapped hands. Emmett stared at her, confused.

What am I supposed to do?

Before I could tell Bella why she had it wrong or tell Emmett that he was doing fine, Alice decided to join me in the present.

“Edward, pull over.”

The calmness in her voice irritated me. She was thinking about what Bella was saying, though—clearly—none of those concerns meant anything. Alice should have known better. Bella didn’t grasp what had happened. How could she? She had no context for any of this.

I gunned the engine automatically, suddenly realizing that Alice didn’t have all the context, either. For all her prescience, there were things she couldn’t see.

“Edward.” Alice was still calm, her tone so reasonable. “Let’s just talk this through.”

“You don’t understand,” I exploded. “He’s a tracker, Alice, did you see that? He’s a tracker!”

Emmett reacted more powerfully to the word than Alice did. Because of course she had seen that—the moment I’d decided to shout it at her.

We’d not had a great deal of exposure to trackers, aside from stories. The most powerful of them were far away, serving in Italy. Carlisle knew one, but as he was the furthest thing from sociable, none of us had ever met Alistair. Emmett and Alice only knew trackers as those with a talent for finding things, finding people. They didn’t understand the concept in the more dynamic sense. James didn’t just have a talent for finding people. Tracking was everything to him.

“Pull over, Edward,” Alice said, as if I hadn’t spoken.

I glowered at her while urging the engine faster.

That’s not how tonight goes, she thought with perfect assurance. “Do it, Edward.”

“Listen to me, Alice,” I seethed, wishing I could put everything I knew directly into her head for once instead of the other way around. She didn’t get it. “I saw his mind. Tracking is his passion, his obsession—and he wants her, Alice—her, specifically. He begins the hunt tonight.”

She was unmoved by my outburst. “He doesn’t know where—”

I cut her off, impatient with her refusal to see. “How long do you think it will take him to cross her scent in town? His plan was already set before the words were out of Laurent’s mouth.”

Bella gasped, and then she was shrieking again. “Charlie! You can’t leave him there! You can’t leave him!”

“She’s right,” Alice said. Still too calm.

My foot eased off the accelerator without my giving it that order. Obviously, I couldn’t have Charlie in danger, either. But how could I be in two places at once?

“Let’s just look at our options for a minute,” Alice coaxed.

I was shocked by the image suddenly in her head. I’d not seen her tracing this future—I would have interrupted, and violently, if I had—but she somehow had it all laid out. Complete.

Alice saw one version of the future in which the tracker lost interest and abandoned the chase.

It’s meaningless to him without the prize, she explained.

It looked just like the old vision, but I could tell it was new. Freshly generated. Bella, her eyes blazing a red so bright it nearly glowed, her features as sharp as though they had been chiseled from diamond, her skin whiter than ice.

Sure enough, the tracker disappeared from this version of destiny.

And Bella’s brilliant eyes stared at me coldly… accusingly.

I wrenched the Jeep onto the shoulder and braked hard. We jerked to a stop.

“There are no options,” I snarled at Alice.

“I’m not leaving Charlie!” Bella yelled at me.

“We have to take her back,” Emmett interjected.

“No.”

Emmett looked at me in the rearview mirror. “He’s no match for us, Edward. He won’t be able to touch her.”

“He’ll wait.” He enjoyed the waiting.

Emmett smiled without amusement. “I can wait, too.”

I wanted to rip my hair out in frustration. “You didn’t see—you don’t understand! Once he commits to a hunt, he’s unshakable. We’d have to kill him.”

Emmett looked at me like I was being slow.

Of course we have to kill him, he thought, but his spoken words were milder. He was being uncharacteristically sensitive, aware of the fragile human he was confining. “That’s an option.”

“And the female,” I reminded him. “She’s with him.” This didn’t affect Emmett at all, so I added, “If it turns into a fight, the leader will go with them, too,” though I doubted that.

“There are enough of us.”

Did he count Rose and Esme in his tally? Of course not. He thought he could do it alone, as if they